196 • 12 THE RISE OF NATIONALISMon the throne a sultan who turned out to be crazy, and then replaced him
with his brother, Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909), whose promises to uphold
the new constitution were suspect.
Well, they should have been. The ensuing Russo-Turkish War put the
empire in such peril that no one could have governed under the Ottoman
constitution. Sultan Abdulhamid soon suspended it and dissolved parlia¬
ment. For thirty years he ruled as a dictator, appointing and dismissing his
own ministers, holding his creditors at bay, fomenting quarrels among the
Great Powers to keep them from partitioning the empire, and suppressing
all dissident movements within his realm. People now view him as having
been a cruel sultan, reactionary in his attitudes toward westernizing re¬
forms and devoted to the doctrine of pan-Islam. This movement alarmed
Russia, Britain, and France, with their millions of Muslim subjects in Asia
and Africa. It is interesting that Istanbul, seat of the sultan-caliph, became
the final home of that wandering pan-Islamic agitator, Jamal al-Din
al-Afghani.
Abdulhamid is remembered for his censors and spies, his morbid fear of
assassination, and his massacres of Armenians (some of whom were plot¬
ting against his regime). Scholars trying to rehabilitate his image have
claimed that he furthered the centralizing policies of the earlier Tanzimat
reformers, that the Ottoman Empire lost no European lands between 1878
and 1908, and that Muslims at home and abroad hailed him as their
caliph. Nevertheless, Sultan Abdulhamid was unquestionably incompe¬
tent, paranoid, and cruel. The empire's finances came under the control of
a European debt commission, the freedoms of speech and assembly van¬
ished, the army came to a standstill, and the navy deteriorated. The ablest
reformers went into exile. Midhat, leader of the New Ottomans, was lured
back with false promises, tried for attempted murder, locked up in the
Arabian town of Taif, and secretly strangled there.
Many Ottomans, especially if they had attended Western schools, felt
that the only way to save the Ottoman Empire was to restore the 1876 con¬
stitution, even if they had to overthrow Abdulhamid first. A number of op¬
position groups were formed. All of them tend to get lumped together as
the "Young Turks," a term possibly borrowed from the "New Ottomans."
Many were not Turks, and some were not even young, but the term has
stuck. The key society was a secret one formed by four cadets—all Muslims
but of several nationalities. It became known as the Committee of Union
and Progress (CUP). Its history was long and tortuous, with moments of
hope interspersed with years of gloom, centering at times on exiled Turkish
writers living in Paris or Geneva, at others on cells of Ottoman army offi¬
cers in Salonika and Damascus. Gradually, many Ottomans adopted the